Portable or transportable yard or lawn vacuums and leaf blowers driven by small electric or gasoline powered engines are well known. Such yard or lawn vacuums are used by home owners and commercial building grounds maintenance crews to clean and remove various debris from lawns, under treed areas and on driveways, for example. Such portable yard vacuums utilize a small engine or motor to spin a high speed centrifugal fan blower to generate a vacuum, using the motive force of airflow to pick up debris. The operation of the impellers of the fan generate a suction on the inlet side of the blower and a positive pressure on the outlet side, wherein the amount of pressure differential generated is generally inversely related to the volume of air flow through the fan, other factors such as fan speed, impeller geometry, air density, etc. being held constant. Lawn vacuums are commonly configured with the motor or engine mounted inline with the fan shaft and directly to the back of the fan housing, provided with a handle of some variety mounted on the fan or motor housing to allow the entire unit to be carried, and manipulated over a surface to be cleaned during use.
Lawn vacuums and blowers are commonly sold configured and equipped for cleanup of outdoor lawn, sidewalk and driveway debris, particularly leaves and lawn clippings. When used as a lawn vacuum, the apparatus is equipped with a bag attached to the fan outlet port to capture and retain leaves and debris in the bag for later disposal. An elongated tube or other debris pick up and transport means is connected to the fan suction port. When used as a yard blower apparatus, an elongated tube is reconfigured to connect to the fan outlet port so that the air flow through the fan is used to blow debris off the driveway by directing and impinging the fan air flow onto debris, thereby displacing the debris. Since outdoor debris such as leaves and clippings can be relatively large in size, the elongated pick up tube is normally of a relatively large diameter, at least relative to the diameter of normal household vacuums. This larger diameter accommodates the pick up of larger size debris encountered in the outdoor environment.
A limitation of yard or lawn vacuums is that the attachments provided are configured for outdoor lawn debris pick up but are not well suited for other debris pick up in other outdoor environments or indoor environments such as bleachers in stadiums, theaters, convention halls, zoos, etc.
Another limitation of the attachments provided with yard or lawn vacuums is that the vacuum attachment generally consists of little more that a tube having an open debris end. This tube can be used to pick up debris on other environments, but the limited size of the tube and therefore the width of the swath cleaned in each pass of the nozzle requires more passes of the nozzle over the surface to be cleaned. The limited swath width and additional cleaning passes results in the waste of time and movement and makes the cleanup process an inefficient one.
Therefore, a vacuum attachment which provides a debris pick up opening having a wide debris pick up, a vacuum attachment that can be removably mounted to and later removed from the vacuum pick up tube of a variety of standard yard vacuums, a vacuum attachment which enhances the functionality of the yard vacuum by adapting the yard vacuum to debris cleanup in a variety of additional environments such as but not limited to bleachers, theaters, athletic stadiums, schools, convention halls, amusement parks, sawdust and debris in building construction, and factories, an attachment that is adjustable in width as to conform to the spacing between, for example, seat rows in a stadium bleacher of theater, such a vacuum attachment for a yard vacuum apparatus would be useful and novel.